The Frozen Abyss

Harold was a lone man, tired and starved. His last hope of warmth, long gone and forgotten to this infinite storm. He could not turn back and what surrounded him was certain death.

Although frozen for miles in a reflective white and daunting grey expanse: Harold had finally made it to water, not knowing he’d been traveling up a stunted wave the entire time, further and further out to sea. He now found himself surrounded by fragile chipped ground. One step down and forward could mean: plugging into a frigid abyss.

There was nowhere else to go.

Harold stood at the precipice of a snow-draped ice cap and looked to the hazy distance of emptiness: with nothing left within. His packs were unconsciously sliding off his usually hunched back – that had straightened with the sight - as Harold released a heavy sigh. The flow of fogged breath: causing a swirl of snowflakes that wisped away flecks of frost from his thick wire beard - poking chaotically through the makeshift cloth wrappings: a frozen framing, encapsulating his haggard time-worn face.

Harold shuffled backward, his pained eyes - squinting against the misleading crystalized shine - beaten dry by the relentless winds that whipped behind him.

He could not turn back.

Harold fretted, he reveled a moment in the renewed sense of fear – after swearing, he had lost all feeling. To where Harold was sure - up until now - that he was incapable of such a thing.  The overwhelming sensations of his first experience of heated anxiety made Harold want to hyperventilate and sweat his heart out. Why would he now decide to feel the bitterness of it all? Harold heard a distant whisper in the extended hull of his dull mind that seemed to rouse with a faint chime. Scattering like an echo down his being, until his toes sweated through the layers of stuffed and folded wool and wigged to the sing-song morbid tune,” This is beautiful. This is heaven. Nothing could be cleaner.”

Suddenly Harold began to feel dirty and itchy, unnerved and out of place. He could not just stand here. Or could he? Something in Harold told him to halt and move, to flee and fight, to stand ground as well as to retreat back. Every option and idea, every weighted suggestion, washed the other out and left him still, ironically frozen in place in a way that made Harold laugh hysterically at himself and to himself.

“Ha…ha! The absurdity of it.” Harold croaked, jumping suddenly to defensive intensity, whipping wildly about himself: surprised by the sound of his own voice – carried in the winds and surrounding him in a universal echo chamber.

Harold suddenly had an intense flash of clarity and understanding. He had been traveling so long, trekking in the whiteness with no compass or direction but remembered now that he had been sent out. At some point in, a faded past – Harold took for dreams and delusions – he was not alone. There were people. There was Reginald…

Like a blow across the face, Harold felt the sweet long lost caress of the back of Reginald’s hand, running down his face, as Harold grasped and clawed at Reginald’s pooling blackened shoulder with clumsy blindness.

Harold gasps back to the white expanse just before Reginald gurgled his last breath.

Harold had not realized that he sat down at some point in all this and was rocking back on his knees with his mitted gloves dug deep into slush and raw with crusted snow. Harold fell backward with a deafened thump on the powdered frosted foam of the stalled wave, seemingly waiting to crash down too. Harold wailed in a torrent of anguish as he grieved and delved into the hindsight of why. Why could he not just hold Reginald’s hand there forever? Why did he not just rip his heart out there and die next to the man who stood beside him before the world crumbled to this hoary oblivion?

Harold felt suffocated by his life by his choices. He realized this was him tearing out his heart. This mission was suicide. Harold had searched for the farthest end - away from all. Seeking the purest form and place he could find because only there would be Reginald's perfection. And only there could Harold finally rest. Only there could Harold feel Reginald’s hand upon his face and experience that indefinable wholeness that made Harold complete. And now, a sense of guilt turned Harold frigid beyond account.

He left them to die.

Harold had put on his bravest of faces when he left the tribe in search of hope - when he had none. Harold was searching for Reginald; he was searching for death. The tribe had sent him to seek life. To find water, to find something. The snow was polluted up until this untouched haven. Everything behind Harold was grey and chemically steaming and frozen into a putrid slosh of vibrant intoxicating greens.

Harold had gotten lost along the way, then realized he never did keep track from the start. He left the tribe blind and went off in any direction but back. While internally: that was always Harold’s plan: attempt to cycle around. Harold thought pushing forward would incidentally bring him back. That the tribe kept moving forward after the great slaughter took the only source of light and warmth in Harold’s life. After they were overtaken by a neighboring horde - of former tribesmen - turned rabid in the expanse returning crazed with the disease.

Harold realized now that something fractured inside him when Reginald died. In a way, he was just as diseased and crazed as those who murdered Reginald. Harold was disgusted with himself. How could he come to such depravity? He had shunned and hated those tribesmen with a fury that had consumed Harold whole.

Harold laid staring at the dimming sky of illuminated blackness, a speck, in a sea of white. He understood the horde. He understood hope. Harold felt the eyes of the tribe staring back down at him as though through an interconnected looking glass. Surrounded by the last star and looking up, to gaze upon Harold.

Destroyed, inwardly shattered: Harold felt embarrassed. He wondered if they saw him sprawled out in leisure or in his miserable state. Harold’s mind raced with their inner thoughts, “He has found a haven. He has left us. He has found us. We are doomed. We are saved.”

Then Harold heard Reginald’s voice sprinkle down with the drift that swirled past his exposed cheek and out into the frozen expanse laid out before him. Harold could not make out the words, only the feeling left behind that whispered,” Ahead.”

Harold gasped, scrambling to his feet with fresh resolve.

In an instant, Harold stood with his burdens strapped to his back. A fire in his soul, Harold stepped out into the frozen sea, disappearing into the abyss.